The year of big changes (2013) has broken. 2012 was apocalypse. 2013 = chain reactions firing all over the place. 2014 = actual work. Hopefully something to show for all those leaps into the unknown.

Feeling inspired by the appearance of some semblance of a team around May and I for Door Into the Dark. And some new ideas involving birds and navigation and ropes. We’re doing a scratch of the piece in mid March at the iDocs conference in Bristol – held at the Watershed and run by the multitalented human hive of knowledge on interactive documentary, Mandy Rose (no relation to me). So, a deadline dawns and the real work begins.

Also, today I discovered this heroic and hairy man:

Mike Nelson. He builds “fictional architectural installations”… or, sets that have some sort of a storyworld to them that you immerse yourself in. I can’t believe I haven’t heard of him before, where have I been and what have I been doing and why am I watching too many documentaries and not looking at ART. duh.

Jonathan Jones says of him… “While others were being snapped up by Charles Saatchi, he was filling out a planning application to the London Borough of Hackney to rebuild Babylon in Shoreditch, with a detailed description of Nebuchadnezzar’s throne room and the hanging gardens…. His piece “The Coral Reef”, a series of rooms he built in 1999 at Matt’s Gallery in Bow, east London, induced a nameless anxiety in those who experienced it. With its warren of corridors and claustrophobic rooms – a junkie’s squat, a minicab office, an arcade, a workshop, all supplied with enigmatic props – this installation caught imaginations like no other recent work by an emerging British artist. And then it was dismantled, vanishing back into the imagination. Even now, thinking about those gloomy corridors, I have goosebumps. When you wanted to get out, you came up against a false door; even the reception of the gallery with its visitors’ book turned out to be part of the installation, a fictional place. When you signed the book, what were you assenting to?” (extract from an article in the Guardian)

This really really excites me. More than films, more than comfy cinema seats and surround sound. Documentary installations are now a bonefied obsession. How can a documentary be a physical, tactile place? How can you sit in it and taste it’s air? What is the place of narrative in all of this? What is narrative vs storyworld and does it even matter. Too much theory. With a combination of Kutlug Ataman, Janet Cardiff and a few others floating around in my mind though… art and documentary and sets and satire are all starting to blend together in a delicious mix. (Amy)